New ideas and inventions that affect social life cannot thrive unless they are somehow embedded in the society for which they are intended. Innovation will always be connected somehow—both in the ways it is communicated and perceived, and in terms of content—to what people know, believe, want, value, and can understand. This is true even of radical, path-breaking, ‘revolutionary’ ideas and insights. This phenomenon of ‘anchoring’ is central to the new research agenda of the Dutch classicists, Anchoring Innovation.
Work Package B of the Anchoring Innovation program is responsible for forging and preserving connections between all the different thematic groups studying Anchoring Innovation in such different domains as politics, science, religion, philosophy, the law, material culture, literature, and linguistics.
Within this Work Package, we are looking for a Postdoc (1.0 fte, 18 mos) who will help design and organise a transversal workshop on ‘Agents of Change’ across all of these domains, as well as some of the team meetings. We invite candidates to submit a research proposal that will lead to two peer-reviewed publications on a theme or themes related to that of the workshop.
Innovation is about forms of purposeful or intentional change to solve newly identified problems or to cope with old issues in as yet unexplored ways. We use the term ‘invention’ to refer to the production of that intentional change in the form of ideas, practices, techniques, or objects. Invention, then, is part of the innovation process, but not coextensive with it. Innovation is what is perceived or constructed as innovation, the successful adoption of something new. It constitutes a development in which we must assume, or can identify, agency of one or more agents, who intended, instigated, invented, adopted, or promoted something new. We will distinguish between the history of the innovation itself (how it is embedded in the history of its discipline, for example) and issues of adoption and acceptance, of public discourse and representation, rhetoric and debate. The type of agency involved will be of interest throughout: the classical world is obsessed with (individual) ‘inventors’, but in many cases it is impossible to identify one specific source of an ‘invention’/’innovation’. Innovation often takes place at sites of cultural contact, as a process of synergy with important roles for ‘translators’ and ‘cultural brokers’.
More information about the Anchoring Innovation research agenda of OIKOS can be found on the OIKOS website (http://www.ru.nl/oikos/anchoring-innovation), including an article by Ineke Sluiter, entitled “Anchoring Innovation: a Classical Research Agenda”.